I thought I would toss something like Disqus on here, but I remembered to search “self hosted” first and found Cusdis. I tried their hosted version just long enough to see it was workable, then put up a self hosted instance so I could dig in and start tweaking it.
Had to tweak the iframe height already, it was claustrophobically short and I didn’t like the CSS hacks I was using to try and make it taller from Arise instead of Cusdis.
02/12/25 Update - I finally stopped hacking away at generated JavaScript and learned how to build my own Cusdis Docker image from a fork of the repo. I spent a long time figuring out how to get old branches that must have compiled at that time to compile today - turns out the simplest solution was just removing every caret ^ from the packages file, so nothing can get upgraded. But after figuring that out and poking around some more I found the newest branch and got it compiling. I learned how to apply the hacks I had in the JavaScript into the TypeScript, and it’s been a lot easier.
Cusdis uses Tailwind CSS styling, which I actually thought about learning at one point – But I decided I need to learn CSS itself first, so I’ve been slowly stripping away the Tailwind classes and styling things with “Cyberia Theme” classes from the blog theme.
I’m still not a fan of the height - it’s tall enough, until it’s not and you wind up scrolling again. I’m looking at ways to resize it, but evidently they’re all a bit hacky - and require adding more JavaScript. I’ve been trying to stick to CSS only, but Cusdis definitely needs some JavaScript, so a tiny bit more for the iframe resizing is probably OK.